A Preview of Pinehurst No. 2

going to go in depth on Pinehurst number two. We're going to talk about the golf course, and you know, kind of I think in the lens of hosting this US Open and where I wanted to kick things off was I think just to set the stage like this golf course, whether you like Pinehurst number two or not, is going to be a prominent figure in the US Open moving forward. So five of the next twenty five US Opens, including that, so that's including this year, are

going to be at Pinehurst number two. It is really a I think, like you could say never before frequency of a golf course in the US Open. ROTA. I know they don't like the term ROTA, but it's becoming very clearly a RODA. And and this golf course I think presents a unique challenge to golfers. And I think the big storyline because of how much it's going to be on the on the schedule, you know, it hosts in twenty fourteen. Twenty fourteen was kind of pre this

modern golf. It was right at this inflection point in the game where the game was getting younger, but you still had a lot of holdovers from the previous era. And what I mean by previous era is golfers who grew up without track man, golfers who grew up playing heads that were smaller than four hundred and sixty ccs. And now we have entered this new era of golf that is extraordinarily youth driven, speed driven, and Pinehurst number two will be a prominent fixture of this era as

a US Open course. And I'm very interested to see ten years later from twenty fourteen when Martin Kimer potted his way around the greens. But also, like you know, everybody talks about that Martin Kaimer, two time major winner, one of players at that time, I mean, this bonafide great golfer, hall player, and at that time, you know like he kind of it was just he blew away

the field like he dominated. It wasn't you know, it wasn't It was a tour to force, and in terms of this year, I'm super I'm fascinated with, like what skill sets are going to be you know, like we're going to enter this data room, like this data world of golf, Like what skill sets are going to be super.

somebody really making bank with their short game. I could see somebody having a great putting week and winning, maybe mostly for that reason. I could also see somebody getting hot with driver and just hitting it really long and straight all week, having shorter approaches into these very tricky

greens and winning that way. So I think that one of the exciting things about Pinehurst number two hosting this major after the PGA Championship this year at Valhalla, where we all knew going in exactly what the dynamics of the tournament would be and which skill sets would rise to the top. One of the exciting things about this course in this US Open is that I'm not totally sure what the profile of player is going to be that ends up at the top of the leaderboard.

I should mention single row irrigation, real deal native. There are a lot of like old fashioned aspects of this golf course that a lot of the newly renovated championship courses don't have, and so in this case, restoration might actually be close to the proper term for what they did.

And I think this is what you're saying. It's like where you could see a shorter hitter thriving basically on every hole at Pinehurst number two, every par four and par five fairways narrow at about three hundred yards, they get narrow and the waste kind of comes in and they're able to do this narrowing. Very It takes a while to realize that this happened, like I've played a

number of times before I started realized. Then I went on Google or started looking at it and I was like, oh my god, Like this kind of narrows down at every three hundred yard mark, and you know it's pretty wide. Then it gets really narrow at three hundred yards. So it's like it's an interesting golf course in that sense.

I'm super excited to see. Strategically, are we going to see a lot of drivers And if you think about like even driving distance in twenty fourteen, the number of players who could hit the ball over three hundred yards and twenty fourteen or averaged over three hundred yards in twenty fourteen pales in comparison to basically the entire tour averaging over three hundred yards in twenty twenty four So are we going to see a lot of drivers you

take on a little bit more risk. The Native is really a cool aspect of the golf course because you can get good lies. You can be in spots where it's like, oh, this is great, I can still hit it at the green and in some cases, like I like hitting it out of this because I'm going to get a little bit and get some zip on the ball,

Like it's not a bad spot. You could get a better angle if you're into the Native on some of these holes where like you know, you get over and you have like a really nice way to pro a very difficult green to hit from the fair away. So with the Native, but then also you could get into spots where it's like unhittable, like and I'm chipping out

sideways type stuff. So off the tee is going to be fascinating, Like I, you know, my friend's Zach Blair qualified, and I'm curious he's the shortest hitter on the PGA Tour, but like he's going to be hitting to wider spots in the faraway than everybody else. And how does that dynamic play out over the week. My hunch is that power is going to win, because it usually does. But I wouldn't be surprised, as you said, to see a short, shorter hitter or a couple shorter hitters contending here.

five on Thursday Friday. Some players actually went pretty low. We remember that Open as being brutal, but it was really only very brutal on the weekend when the course did dry out. And so I've looked at the forecast. There's a little bit of rain in the forecast, and so we might get a softer version of Pinehurst number two, And I kind of wonder how the course would play for these players now ten years later, a little bit soft.

I think some players could go low here and that we could see more of a power game start to dominate at the course, because that's just what happened when the conditions are a little bit softer. It doesn't matter what the course is now. I think that there would still be some really interesting dynamics to the course, some really interesting holes where power players might have to make decisions that they're uncomfortable making given the way that they're

asked to strategize the game. Now. It's just hard to moneyball this course. I think it's not a simple solution using the methods that tour players now use to solve most courses. As you say, if you just wail away at driver, you're often going to find yourself in the worst position on the whole, and so that has to be on your mind in some way. So you're going to consider clubbing down, You're going to consider choosing some kind of weird line off the tee that might be

a little bit uncomfortable. You have to do some different things at this course than you normally do at even major championship venues, and so the details of players' strategy should be very, very interesting, even if it is a little bit softer and slower out there this year than it was ten years ago.

Piners number two. So this golf course can recover from some rain and still present firm, but it is not like out of this world. And and I think the main and obviously we're we'll get to this, but the greens are the main defense of this golf course or not. I'd say probably the star defense of this golf course, especially for the modern game. Those targets and why they's the defense is that the targets are so small and they repel, often repel in all directions. And when those

greens are soft, the targets just get bigger. And that if they if they let's just say, the softness creates a twenty percent bigger target. It just makes such a such a huge impact on how comfortable the best players in the world are going to be. And I think Jeff Ogilvie in the video that we get that you you and Cameron put together on this had just like a great quote about Pinehurst that I think is really really true. The more you play it, the more it

scares you. The more times you play there, the more times you hit great shots that you think are like really good and end up in bad places. And what it does is it builds scar tissue. You start to think about that and that's when targets start to feel smaller and smaller because you think about, oh, I hit that shot so good the other day and it rolled off the right side here, like I need to move my target two yards left, And I think what you

were saying about the modern game the strategy. This is where Pineher's number two kind of provides some anecdotes to that, is that the strategy is like very it's very simplistic how these guys plays like avoid hazards game towards fat sides of the green. But when the targets are smaller and there's repelling edges in all directions, it becomes harder and harder to do that. And there's no water. We aren't talking about a place that has water hazards that

you're avoiding. So areas look okay, especially if you're looking at it from Google Earth. It's okay to bail right here and let it repel off. But with the way the greens are crowned and the short grass around them, and the way the short grass can run into waste areas, this is where you can get yourself in a lot of trouble because the ball that you're aiming six yards left of a or six yards left of a right pin. If you tug at ten yards left in my repel off.

So you hit it four yards left of your target, it can repel off and then run another fifteen yards away. This is the beauty of the golf course is that it accentuates mediocre shots. It accentuates the penalty for mediocre shots. If you hit bad shots, you're going to be in like a world of hurt. And if you hit great shots, you're gonna have great looks a birdie like. That's the thing. I think this golf course similar to Augusta National with

its greens. They're very different greens than Augustin National, but in a similar way, they accentuate the level the degrees of quality of shot really well.

It plays a little bit downhill and so most players are going to be actually hitting iron off this tee because there is a of that bottlenecking that you talked about earlier in the fairway, which by the way, is not a Ross design feature. It's not a BILLCRP design feature. That's a Mike Davis, former CEO of the USGA design feature. That's something that he requested from Billcore. In any case,

this hole plays a little bit downhill, it's short. Players will hit an iron off the tee for the most part, and then a short iron or a wedge into the green. You can play this hole a couple of times and hit the fairway, hit the green, move on with a birdier par and say to yourself, that's a gentle handshake. That's an easy hole. That's a simple hole. But the first time you miss the green on that hole, that's

when the game starts. Say you bail out to the right a little bit because you're scared of the bunker that's guarding the left side of the green. That bunker looks really scary, It eats into the green. It looks like the place that you don't want to be. So you bail out to the right a little bit. You try to hit the right portion of the green, but you miss and you end up in that little chipping swale.

You discover that there are these little contours, these little mounds down at the bottom of the swale that give you these weird lies for your chips, and it's all short grass, and you try to hit that chip and you discover that it's really not easy. Maybe you end up hitting that chip over the green into the bunker on the other side, and you end up walking away with double bogie and you're like, okay, I can't do that again. I'm not going to bail out right again.

So you come back the next time, and maybe you miss a little bit left and you end up in that bunker. And then then you just start thinking, Okay, where do I play on this hole? Where do I miss on this hole? What do I really have to avoid on this hole? You have to avoid everywhere. I mean, you can miss short like, that's that's okay.

looking at. I was like, God, that green's so small, it's so so tidy. And I ended up just dump. I didn't hit it far o. I had like a backpin and I was like, don't do not go long. Whatever you do, don't go long. And I landed like kind of like middle of the green and it spun back and spun off the front of the green. Like it's just like an interest. Like if you don't if you don't make committage swings, there are going to be

chipping from all day long. Like the only way to succeed at Pinehurst is getting full commitment over your shots because like you cannot. I think, like this is the thing that's so interesting with modern golf. Modern golf is so much about bailing out like that's half the game.

Half the game is just like understanding I can bail here, don't dump it over here like that, That's what the game is has become and hit good shots like and there's like a commitment level that that most golf courses allow players to get to understanding where to bail out at Pinehurst, Like, the interesting thing is it's like when you start to bail out, that's when you get in trouble. When you aren't committed to hitting a really great shot

and you're thinking about what you're where, you're misses. That is that is like the biggest thing that can get you in trouble. There is not stand over the shot and saying to yourself, hit a great shot here, And I think, like what a golf course. And I don't want to dump on this golf course anymore. I think it's gotten enough abuse.

bogie maybe maybe badge, maybe a bogey. At Pinehurst, I think like you can hit really good shots and walk away with like shaking your head, like how did I just make a bogie? And the answer usually is like, you know what, I was a little too cautious with my target.

up and over. You have to hit up to the level of the green pad, which is higher than you are generally when you're chipping at Pinehurst because the greens are crowned or turtle back and so you're below the surface of the green, so you got to hit your shot up that first slope. But then often, as Jeff Ogilvie mentioned in our video, a lot of the greens have kind of lower middle sections, and so that means that you have to then judge the rollout of your

chip shot or your putt or whatever you're doing. You have to judge the rollout of it on a downslope, and so you're hitting up a contour and down a contour a lot when you bail out and miss at Pinehurst, because generally the bailouts are kind of like away from bunkers, away from hazards, So you're going to end up in

a lot of short grass if you're playing conservatively. But then that chip shot that you hit is the one chip shot that I think pros really don't like where you're hitting up something and then down something because it's so hard to judge your distance and it's so hard to like figure out what club to hit. Sometimes maybe pros hit a lot of lob wedges, maybe they'll just go for a standard lob wedge shot, but I don't think that's always the best play on these chip shots.

Sometimes keeping it along the ground is a lot more effective. Other times you do want to fly it a little bit farther, but it's hard to figure out exactly what shot to hit in those situations because you have the slow down pace going up and you have the speed up pace going back down, and that just introduces a kind of complexity that these guys don't see a whole lot at PGA Tour courses, standard PGA Tour courses or major championship venues like Valhalla.

green and they're up and over. And you know, this is what made Martin Kimer's performance so amazing was doing it with putter all week long is very hard. This was not an easy thing to just be putting balls from off the green to dead. If it was, everybody would have been doing it. It was an extraordinary lag putting week from off the green for Martin Kimer. So yeah, I it's it'll be I'm curious how players are gonna

hit shots. Are we going to see a lot? Do you think we'll see a lot of people putting?

runoff Bermuda runoffs. Like you could see some of them play some bump and runs, especially like to short sided pins where you just kind of like hit it into the hill and let that kill it ye with like a six or seven.

thing about every hole at Pinehurst number two. So we usually do those for a couple majors a year, you know, with with this year the US Open, that was kind of the big one this year, but I think last year we did Okill and LACC. Those are fun videos and then you get a ton of other benefits. We have a Pinehurst number two profile on there that I wrote. I think it's like eighteen hundred words about Pineer's number two.

So there's a ton of stuff. Those profiles come out just about every week of the year, so cover a wide range of courses, from hidden gems to the best courses in the world, So check that out Club TFF. If you're interested interested in joining, go to thefridagg dot com slash membership. Thanks, and let's get back to Pinehurst number two. Well, let's talk about some favorite aspects of the golf course. If what's kind of your let's just say a couple of your favorite things. We'll just start

with one. I'll kind of chime in with one of mine and we'll go from there.

to hold the fairway. So what the fairways do in the landing zones is so consistently interesting because the fairways don't just go straight down the whole corridor, which by the way, they did by the time that Bill Kohrer and Ben Crenshaw were brought into the course in twenty ten. They had kind of straightened out and turned into these little, you know, very narrow strips leading up to the greens.

And what they do now is they kind of snake, They jog, they slant, They run on diagonals in relation to the tea. And then you add to that kind of directional variety of the fairways the topographical variety. So they tilt right to left, they tilt left to right, They sometimes run downhill in the landing zone, they sometimes

run uphill in other parts of the landing zone. There's always something going on topographically in the landing zones at Pinehurst that is then combined with some sort of directional trickery in the fairway. And so an example of this,

a simple example of this would be on the eleventh hole. Now, this is a fairly subtle hole topographically, and there are other holes that might be a better example in terms of you know how big some of the movements of the land can be at Pinehurst, But the eleventh hole is a good elegant example of a fairway that runs on a left to right diagonal in relation to the te right, so the long carry is on the right and the short carry is on the left, So you

have that factor from the tee, and then you also have a right to left tilt in that fairway. It's a fairly subtle tilt, but it's there. And so what this does is that if you play safely out to the left, if you bail out to the left, the safe side of the fairway that feels the most comfortable, that requires the least carry, the tilt of the fairway

will push your ball farther to the left. And so what that causes you to do the next time you play the hole is say, okay, I got to bite off a little bit more of this right side in order to avoid running through the fairway on the other side and having a really bad angle into the green because the green is very hard to approach from that left side of the hole. So then you start playing

more right on that hole. But then eventually maybe you get to a point where you miss right and then you're totally dead because you're in the you're in the waste area, you might be in the forest, and so you the the nature of the landing zone on that hole causes you to make calculations on the tee that are not just simple keep it down the middle of the fairway. You've got to pick an aiming point and you've got to execute it well. And that's on pretty

much every long hole at Pinehurst. So just pay attention to what's happening in the landing zones. It's always interesting.

against the kind of formulaic nature of golf. What has become with strategy where it's like, okay, I'm going to just avoid this and hit it over here. What happens is that then you you get it yourself into more more trouble. The waste being the like the waste, it's just such a that I think professional golfers hate when they don't know what they're where their balls, what it's getting into. And that's what the waste presents is that it's not rough like irrigated rough, you know what it is.

And it's like, Okay, I know the ball is going to stop, and it's going to be in this type of life. I get a really bad lie, I'll hit it to the front front of the green. If I get a good lie, I've got a shot at it. You know. The waste kind of accentuates both variables of it. It is like I could be perfect, I could be but that chance that I do have chance. It's not something that golfers like. So the fairways being surrounded by chance rather than you know, I know exactly what I'm

getting into. It just presents another unique mental challenge of the golf course.

about it. So two points about it. One, I think an underappreciated aspect of the sand in wiregrass at Pinehurst is how the wiregrass can affect shots in a variety of ways. It's not just either you're in a tuft of wiregrass and you're screwed or you're in a sandy, scrubby lie and you're kind of okay. Often you will find yourself next to or directly up against a tuft

of wiregrass. Right your ball will be somewhere in the vicinity of one of these little profusions of wiregrass, and you'll have to manufacture some kind of shot out of there, because you can get to the ball, the ball is in a good lie, but the wiregrass is getting in the way of your swing somehow, and so you have to hit some sort of creative shot. And that's what's so cool I think about this native and what makes it a good test of skill. It requires a variety

of techniques. It requires flexibility on the part of the player. It requires players to manufact extra shots and hit different shapes and use different swing paths, as opposed to just hacking out and using their strength in that way. Another point, a little bit less positively, is that the USGA, along with Pinehurst, has introduced a lot more wiregrass this year for this year's us Open, Right, so we're going to see you just more coverage of wiregrass, more regular coverage

of wiregrass at Pinehurst. And one of the things that Bill Corr really emphasized in his work at Pinehurst was randomizing the danger in the waste areas, putting those little tufts of wiregrass in a bunch of different kind of randomly scattered places, not having a regular idea of where you're really in trouble. And so I think that introducing more wiregrass and making the coverage kind of more complete in those waste areas has taken away some of the randomness that makes that hazard what it is.

the world, but a little bit less experienced. The golf course seemed to perplex them, like it they were getting into positions where, you know, being the closer to the hole wasn't necessarily better because the lack of ability to generate spin on certain shots where you know, being a little bit further back sometimes with advantageous where like the

chance of the wiregrass was was really shining. So I think the twenty nineteen us AM has been a tournament that's stuck with me for a long time, just in sense, in the sense of like that was like very good modern championship golf. So I think like one of my favorite things about Pioneer's number two, and it's just I think one of the best three hole stretches of golf

anywhere in the world is three four five. This to me, there's a great Tom dok quote about you know, a great golf course makes an impression in the first five holes, I think is what he said. But then somebody that Blake Conant, who works for Tom told me he says to them, three holes, this golf course really hits its stride at three four five to one and two are

on pretty subtle ground. They get you out to three four five, which you know is famously three Green is right where dal Ross's house they lived in at Piners was. But from that that stretch of holes, I think, you know, we probably won't see a ton of it on the telecast just because of its being early in the in the round. But if I was going to go watch golf at Pineers, that's that's an area I would camp out as three Green because you can kind of you watch shots into five, t shots on six, shots into

three right there. So three is a short par four that you kind of you're gonna lay back off the tee, and then it's one of the most magnificent greens at Pinehurst number two. It is built way up in the air. The target is seemingly the hood of a Volkswagen Beetle, and it's you know, it's a pretty easy hole to hit the ball into the fairway and get yourself a wedge, but an extraordinarily hard hoole to hit a wedge into. So it's just a great it's just a great little

par four. There's so the green just has some neat little pockets in it. And then you go to uh four and five, which is you know, a classic par nine between the two of them, long par four, short par five. You know, if you get out of there at under nine, you feel really good about yourself. And it's got some of the dynamics that you talked about the variety off the tee. So you know on or the fairway kind of goes cut, it cuts kind of

right to left. You're gonna be trying to hug the left side of the fairway to cut the distance of the hole down, but the fairway slope severely left or right.

pretty vicious false front. The front kind of cuts on a diagonal too, which makes the proch shot even harder. And then you come back with five, which that's it's an extraordinary golf hole. And unlike the other hole, which kind of it moves, you gotta just you want to play like a rope draw here like you want to just you could play it out to the right and turn it over and that's gonna get you the biggest drive because the hole kind of moves to the left.

And and and then that green, I mean, that's about as tough of a green as you're gonna find in golf. It repels every way, vicious false front and then vicious false back. Yes, it's like that's the cool that green is unbelievable, like you're terrified of everything, and the green, the way it repels in the back, and it's just somewhere you don't want to be.

some length on this course, some extra length. They were the latest holes that Ross added in the design of Pinehurst Number two. They were added in nineteen thirty five. The course had started to be built in you know, the mid nineteen hundreds, the first decade of the twentieth century, and so the fourth and fifth holes were additions, and they were both long holes on the most dramatic topography on the course, so they immediately feel like something different

on this golf course. But the reason I love five is a par five so much is that, as you mentioned, there's that terrible, terrifying false front on that green, and the way that it's a false front is so clever because it's kind of like it doesn't just sort of slope off all at once, It just kind of gradually starts sloping, and then the volume on the steepness just gets turned up and turned up and turned up until finally it just falls off a cliff, and so that

false front eats so far into the green. Because of that, the false front starts really far into the green and everything feeds down into that bunker short left of the green. So basically, if you go for that green and you don't get up and over that false front, if you don't get to the middle of the green, basically where the false front finally levels out and allows for some pins, then you're gonna probably run down into that bunker if

it's firm enough. And so your calculation from the fairway, if you're going for that hole in two, is am I okay with being down in that left bunker? Because that's the likely outcome if I go for this green and two and don't hit it perfectly? Or am I just going to take my medicine and hit it out to the right to this little pocket on the high side of the hole that allows for a nice little wedge approach into this green that most pros can execute in their sleep. And so that's why I think it

works so well. It's just everything everything about that hole makes you think that you should be going for it, that this should be a long part four. But then once you play it a few times and you're in that left bunker a few times, then you think, okay, maybe this really is a three shotthle.

It's not a hit it one two and you're okay, hit it one fifty one and it's coming down the front. It's if you hit it one fifty two right on your line, it's perfect. If you push it like a yard, that line moves to one fifty two and a half. If you pull it, that line's one fifty one right. So like you start, that angular nature of the front is also like an important aspect of the golf course.

This is, you know, kind of like when you talk about why it's such a frustrating golf course for the best players in the world is because of these little tiny features where like precision. You know, these guys live in you know, really like five yard windows, and within those five yard windows, the numbers that matter to them, what the front edge, what the carry number is oftentimes is very different from the left side to the right side,

and that's where you hit these really good shots. Where any other golf course, like really, you know, almost any other golf course in the world. These are great shots. They're really great shots that yield fifteen foot birdie putts at Pinehurst number two, these really great shots that you'd be happy with everywhere they play on the PGA Tour.

At Memorial this week, the week before, you'd be thrilled, thrilled, ecstatic with the shot end up twenty yards away in a hollow with a really hardship shot coming up.

really I would I have like a hard time. Like I think that one of the best questions you can ask is what's the weakest hole at a golf course? And I don't know what the weakest hole at Piner's number two is.

designating that one as the best. But yeah, I mean, I just think eleven through eighteen is so brilliant at Pinehurst and that whole stretch that almost the entirety of that back nine. I love ten two, but for me, the course really kind of hits its stride with eleven through eighteen. Tens of brute just ten tens, a long par five, and it's got some interesting features to it, for sure, But eleven through eighteen are all basically intact from nineteen oh seven. Those holes have been in the

routing of Pinehurst Number two from the very beginning. Obviously, some have been lengthened and changed sixteen plays as a par four for the pros instead of as a par five. I think it's a little more interesting as a par five. But that's okay, it's you know, it's part comes with

the territory. But I just think those holes are so great, and you could talk about individual features of each hole, but I think what you really discover in that stretch of the golf course, if you're walking the golf course, is how clever and varied the routing is. Because for a lot of the back nine, you're kind of going back and forth. The courses is doubling back on itself a few times before finally wandering back to the clubhouse.

So eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. Basically, you know they zigzag, but there's this wandering feeling to the routing in that part of the course where they're not just doubling back straight with each other. It's not like they're playing side

by side. There's a little angle change with each of those holes where they play in a slightly different direction and they form these kind of triangles instead of forming straight lines, and it gives you this feeling that you're kind of getting lost in this property, you're not exactly sure where you are. You don't have a strong sense of orientation into the clubhouse or the starting point, or

even to a couple of holes ago. You're just kind of meandering through the property at that point, and that to me is where the course becomes really beautiful, where the prettiness of the pine forest and the sand and all the native vegetation really comes through. For me, that's where that happens. And you know, a lot of Pinehurst, the resort in general, is just it's very kind of developed. There are a lot of buildings, a lot of homes,

and there's a lot of golf. Right whenever you're playing golf on one course, you can almost always see golf on another course because there's just so many everywhere golf holes out there, like it's ridiculous. You know, Pinehurst number four is right next door to those holes that I'm talking about on the back nine, and in fact, parts of Pinehurst number four used to be part of Pinehurst

number two. In any case, for me, though, because of the way the routing moves in the middle of the back nine, the property just shows off a little bit there, and that's what surprised me the most the first time I played the course, because I didn't expect Pinehurst number two to be really beautiful. That's not really its reputation. But during those holes, that's where that esthetic appreciation of the land that Donald Ross was able to use in

this part of the country comes through the most. And so I think that's something that when people, if people go to the tournament or if they play the course, that's something they pay attention to, is just how good it feels to be out on that part of the property.

hard to understand where the wind's going. Tall pines wind, So that's another recipe of the golf course. If you get that ten plus mile in our wind, it can be hard to tell where exactly it's coming from. And when you couple in the penalty for really close to right shots but just off it magnifies that something I like about Pinehurst Number two. I don't think it would ever get brought up as like the greatest set of

par threes in the world. I do really like the par threes though, I think they have like there's a nice little variety to them. They play. They're each pretty unique, I think probably if you want to make a you know, six and fifteen kind of kind of feel a little

bit similar. But they're spaced out pretty well and they embody the characters of the golf course where it's like, here's a long iron, mid to long iron and it's really terrifying that it's gonna repel everywhere and hit the shot, which which I think fits the golf course really well, Like in they're very difficult shots. I think nine and seventeen are are extraordinarily great par threes. Nine might be

the prettiest hole on the golf course. I think you're kind of playing back up into the corner of the property, great canopy of trees, beautiful bunkering, and you cannot miss long. You see all this trouble up front with the bunkers. Yeah, long is the thing that you cannot do. And it's a very it's a sneaky look shallow from the tea, but it's an extremely shallow green and it seems like it's just like an easy place to hit it long.

And I think it's like a subliminal thing where you're you're looking at the trouble short and you're like, I don't want to I want to miss short, you miss long? Yes, And then seventeen. I think seventeen is a great penultimate hole where you know, if you can stand up there and hit a great mid iron into the green, you can earn yourself a really good look at Bertie And if you don't, then it's going to be a tough, tough track for par.

And so he found a couple of those pockets on seventeen and especially nine, right. Nine is a classic stretch of land to put a par three on, and so he found that he gets the golf course to that point so that nine can play the way it does. And then seventeen is sort of similar. It's also a ridge to ridge par three and it fits nicely into that piece of land. On six and fifteen, he basically just had to manufacture interest on those part threes. They play on basically flat land, right, and so all of

the interest comes from the green complexes. Both of them are very domed, very rejecting. But I think fifteen is especially scary because of the way that green just kind of rises up from the grade and almost has like not a complete infinity horizon. But there's not much behind that green that gives you a perspective or that makes the green seem smaller and less severe. It's just this kind of hump, you know, coming out of the coming

out of the land. It's like a you know, it's like a whale coming out of the ocean, and you're like, I got to hit that from two hundred yards.

very nicely differentiated from each other. And the other part three is on the course, so obviously like masterful, masterful design to summon those part three from this particular piece of land.

by about ten yards on the left on thirteen. Now thirteen is a short part four with a sharply elevated green where the whole idea of the golf hole is that if you challenge the right side, which is very heavily bunkered and has some nasty, gnarly waste area, if you challenge the right side on that hole, you have a better angle for your short pitch basically for most of these players into the green. So the more you can kind of push to that side, the better off

you are with your angle there. If you bail out to the left, then you have a very tricky shot into that green. There used to be more fairway over there. They brought that in and by about ten yards, and it's just like, again, why are we doing this. It's just to make the scoring average of the hole slightly higher. It certainly doesn't seem to fit with the architecture of the hole because that's the bailout zone you want players to go out there and then try to deal with

that pitch into the green. Now it's just these kind of regularly planted tufts of wiregrass, and it's like, Okay, you know, why are we doing this.

I'm giving this to you, or you can push it up there like every every analytic is telling you to push it up there. I'm going to give you this wedge and I'm gonna give you plenty of space where you're not worried about my three iron missing the fairway. And this is where I just think like the USGA, I I don't know, I don't sometimes I don't think

it's the USGA. I think it's like just tournament set up in general, Like do they do they not understand like the like the dynamics at play here, like where like the theory of why people hit drivers so much, the theory of it is is rooted in you might miss the fairway with a three iron.

super aggressive player. Like I love watching that. Like this guy's content just standing back. He's really big at the baseline and just returning stuff.

kind of dynamic play out over a couple hours. Like if you're if you're trying to like present a golf course for championship, you need to play on some of these dynamics of like you know, like I want players to think about this, and if you make it narrow everywhere, you just they're just gonna hit driver everywhere because it's like, oh I might miss the paraweh if Like, nothing is worse than when you hit an iron and you miss the fairway with an iron, you feel like an idiot.

And then that almost always the next time you play that hole, you're gonna be like, I'm just gonna hit driver.

a nine iron is x percentage more difficult. So that's the beauty of this golf course is you're constantly weighing this versus that it caused an effect, and that's the best golf it's not. It's not just bludgeon.

be an effect of a course like this. We also might see a slightly different version of Pinehurst number two this year that's not quite as savage because we have different weather leading up to the tournament, and we also have a different USGA philosophy that has taken hold since the twenty fourteen US Open in terms of setup, where they have started to become more conservative with it. So those are the caveats. I'm not going to guarantee the greatest championship any of us has ever seen. But I

love this golf course. I think it's a great tournament venue and I'm super excited to see how things play out.

Cameron hurt Us. You know, he's so brilliant at putting together the stories of of these videos, and so yeah, we're very proud of it and we encourage you to check it out. We'll also have some more content on Pinehurst number two coming in Pinehurst area courses coming in Club TFE, So if people go to the Friday dot com slash membership, you can see everything we're offering in

Club TFE. But specifically for this coming week, we're going to do a nice little rollout of good writing we think on Pineherst number two, as well as an additional video that I'm narrating about some of the individual holes on the course. So that's coming from members awesome.